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Two weeks following the 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference and the release of the first beta build of iOS 8 to developers, Apple has provided iOS 8 beta 2 to developers. The new release is available over-the-air in iOS 8’s Settings menu, and it’s available for supported iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches.

iOS 8 officially launches this fall and includes several new features for both consumers and developers alike. iOS Device users will experience a new Health app for integrating health and fitness data, improvements to Safari, enhanced Messages features, design tweaks in Mail, and significant changes to notifications, photo management, and the keyboard. Developers will now be able to create third-party keyboards, integrate the Touch ID fingerprint scanner into apps, and integrate third-party home automation products with iOS.

We’ll be updating this post (below) with new features in iOS 8 beta 2 as they are discovered, and you can share your findings with us via email at tips@9to5mac.com.

Backup

Fixed in beta 2

Certain apps may crash on launch consistently if they came over from a Restore from Backup.

Known Issue

If you do a clean installation, iCloud Backups may not be completely restored to your device.

Workaround: Use iTunes to back up and restore your iOS 8 beta devices.

Battery Life

Known Issue

Extensive console logging of NCLaunchstats may be a cause of reduced battery life.

Workaround: Launch Notification Center, then reboot the device.

Bluetooth

Known Issue

The CoreBluetooth State Preservation & Restoration feature does not work. If your application is jetsammed while in the background performing long-term action(s) with CoreBluetooth, those applications will cease and the application will not be restored.

Bug Reporter

Known Issues

The switch in Developer Settings to hide Bug Reporter is not working.

Workaround: Remove it from the Notification tab in Notification Center settings.

The Bug Reporter icon does not appear on the Home Screen on iPad.

Workaround: Open the app from the Notification tab in Notification Center settings.

The cursor may not get placed in the appropriate text field.

Camera Connector

Fixed in beta 2

When attached, the camera connector is not offered as an import option.

CarPlay

Fixed in beta 2

After using Siri, audio quality goes to 24KHz regardless of where it was originally set.

CarPlay may crash when pressing the Back button when in Now Playing.

Known Issues

When using the knob only, the highlight can move off screen but the scroll position of view doesn’t follow.

The Now Playing screen is missing the Back button in the top-left corner.

CFPreferences

Known Issue

After memory pressure events, apps and system services may lose their preferences.

Workaround: Reboot the device.

CloudKit

Known Issues

Clients sending multiple simultaneous record update requests to the same zone in the private database may encounter CKErrorZoneBusy errors.

Workaround: Clients should send update requests for a given zone one at a time. In addition, they should handle CKErrorZoneBusy errors by retrying with an exponential back off.

Sometimes, very large syncs may fail.

Contacts

Note

The Address Book UI people picker has been changed for iOS 8. A new mode with new API has been added where the app does not need access to the user’s contacts and the user will not be prompted for access. A temporary copy of the selected person is returned to the app. See ABPeoplePickerNavigationController.h for more details.

In iOS 8 beta 2, you must use the new mode. The old mode has been deprecated with this beta.

Known Issues

Certain types of media, such as those synced from iTunes, are not editable in the Photos app.

Sharing extensions are enabled by default.

Sharing extensions display the name of the project instead of the name of the target.

If a Sharing extension or an Action extension hangs, it may be necessary to kill the hosting application.

Using xpc_service_set_attach_handler to profile app extensions for keyboard does not work.

Workaround: Run your app extension in Simulator, then trigger the Keyboard extension to load and attach to the running instance (for example, com.thirdparty.foo.keyboard (123)) from Instruments’ target chooser.

During a debug session, extensions may time out before loading.

Application extensions may behave unpredictably with respect to location access.

Redeploying an extension may disable it in Notification Center.

Workaround: To debug the Today view extension. use “Attach to process.”

After redeploying an app, the Today view extension may not be launched, and sometimes its bundle display name becomes the name of the app.

Workaround: Reboot the device.

FaceTime

Known Issue

FaceTime does not work properly in landscape orientation.

Family Sharing

Fixed in beta 2

While using the iTunes Store you may experience a spinner that never completes.

iCloud Documents & Data created with iOS 8 Beta will be deleted from the servers at some point during the beta period. Information downloaded and not evicted from the device will remain on device and will re-sync after the data wipe occurs.

The UI for managing iCloud Documents & Data does not show the documents and data for iOS 8 Beta and OS X Yosemite Developer Preview. It only shows the documents and data synced with previous operating systems.

Known Issues

In some cases, signing into iCloud can take up to two minutes.

Newly added files may not sync automatically. After signing into iCloud, reboot the device.

iCloud Keychain

Fixed in beta 2

Keychain Access developer APIs may not work in Simulator.

Known Issues

Initial sync does not work if the approving device is locked when the approval occurs.

Workaround: Toggle keychain off and then on again.

After changing an iCloud account password, you may notice an “iCloud Keychain has been reset” message.

Workaround: Add your device back into the keychain syncing circle.

iTunes Store

Fixed in beta 2

Opening iTunes Radio URLs from the iTunes Store music grouping page displays a page that asks you to upgrade to iOS 7.

The shelf is not displayed on first sign-in or first launch.

Keyboards

Fixed in beta 2

Deploying a third-party keyboard multiple times may cause the system keyboard to render incorrectly or go blank.

Workaround: Kill the hosting app or reboot the device.

Custom Keyboards do not have Network Access, even after setting the RequestsOpenAccess key to YES in the plist.

Known Issues

In some cases, you may need to restart an app to get third-party keyboard input to register.

If an iPad is restored while in landscape, it may end up with an offscreen keyboard in certain views.

Location Services

Fixed in beta 2

Apps using visit monitoring that are denied location authorization via Settings may appear to continue using location when they are not.

Visit monitoring may continue if an app is uninstalled while it is monitoring for visits.

When Location Services is turned on, the device’s current location is used to recommend relevant apps on the lock screen. In this beta, this happens whether or not the App Store is enabled for Location Services.

Known Issue

When Location Services is turned on, the device’s current location is used to suggest relevant apps on the lock screen. These suggested apps will remain on the lock screen even after leaving the relevant location.

Lock Screen

Known Issues

Sometimes devices may not wake when the home button is pushed.

Workaround: Use the sleep/wake/power button.

Tapping Emergency on the lock screen does not do anything.

Lost Mode

Known Issues

A device doesn’t display the Lost Mode message in the lock screen if the device was locked at the time it was put into Lost Mode.

Workaround: Reboot the device.

After remote wiping a device and logging into the same (@icloud.com) iCloud account, the Lost Mode lock screen is displayed and the device cannot be unlocked.

Mail

Fixed in beta 2

On iPad, trying to add a contact via a Suggestion Banner causes Mail to hang.

Known Issue

Sometimes Mail crashes when replying to an email with an attachment.

MapKit

Fixed in beta 2

On iPad, tapping on “Points of Interest” can cause Maps to hang.

MKMapItem called with -[MKMapItem url] that have no URL return “http://(null)” when they should return nil.

Known Issue

NSURLSession

Note

Beginning in iOS 8 beta 2, the NSURLSessionTask class provides a new “priority” property with three associated constants: NSURLSessionTaskPriorityDefault, NSURLSessionTaskPriorityLow, and NSURLSessionTaskPriorityHigh. NSURLSessionTask priorities can be used to specify how multiple requests and responses to the same host should be prioritized. Note that the priority is a hint and not a strict guarantee of NSURLSessionTask performance.

For complete usage details of NSURLSessionTask priorities, refer to the NSURLSession.h header file, which is provided by the Foundation framework.

PhotosUI

Note

Reminders

Known Issue

When you select Edit in a list of reminders and then scroll, reminders in the list are no longer editable.

Safari

Note

Safari now blocks ads from automatically redirecting to the App Store without user interaction. If you still see the previous behavior, or find legitimate redirection to the App Store to be broken in some way, please file a bug.

You can now quickly add a site to Shared Links or save a bookmark by tapping and holding on the bookmarks button.

Screen Capture

Fixed in beta 2

QuickTime Player X is unable to connect to iPad Air devices for screen capture.

Settings

Fixed in beta 2

Settings sometimes crashes upon addition of a third-party keyboard.

Sometimes Settings shows an iCloud Drive/iCloud Documents incompatibility dialog and will not let you press OK.

The screen brightness slider in Settings does not work.

When signing out of iCloud, the account will actually be signed out, but the UI will not correctly reflect this until the user goes out of iCloud settings and back into it.

iTunes Wi-Fi Sync does not work.

Known Issues

You are unable to use the “Forgot Apple ID or Password” dialog on your device.

Workaround: Reset passwords from appleid.apple.com.

The username and password fields in iCloud Settings do not display properly.

Setup

Known Issues

Updating the iCloud settings screen may appear to hang during setup.

Workaround: Some accounts may have an extra long lag. Wait a couple of minutes and they should complete.

Touch ID is not enabled for iPhone unlock if a finger was registered in Setup.

Simulator

Fixed in beta 2

The resizable iPhone does not work.

If a resizable device is being used in iOS Simulator, keyboard input will go to the width and height text fields if they have focus. If you want input to go to the hosted iOS app, you will need to use the Tab key to change focus away from the text field.

Logging into Game Center from the Settings app will result in an error:

Unable to connect to server. The operations couldn’t be completed. (Cocoa error 4097.)

Known Issues

Apps deployed to CarPlay do not launch or display controls.

Changing keyboards in Settings > General > Keyboard requires you to relaunch your app before the new settings are observed.

If you rename Xcode.app after having previously run it, Simulator stops working.

Workaround: Reboot or revert the name change.

The Toggle In-Call Status Bar menu option in the Hardware menu does not work.

UIKit

Note

Fixed in beta 2

UIScrollViewcontentInset is not set correctly when pushing a navigation controller on a navigation controller in a UISVC.

There is no publicly available way to customize the search key for a UISearchBar.

Known Issues

Share sheets sometimes include the “Send to Shared Photostream” item when they should not.

If an app is using a xib as its main window and is launched in landscape iPad, the main window will have the incorrect dimensions, causing significant distortion and difficulty using presented view controllers. An app may have to be force-quit after presenting a system view controller to function again.

Workaround: Launch all apps in portrait before rotating to landscape.

WebKit

Notes

Subpixel rendering is now on by default for all web content. Websites or in-app web views with extremely tight design constraints may render differently. Solutions for each issue will vary, but use Web Inspector to adjust position, border thickness, and width or height of elements.

Fixed in beta 2

SecRequestSharedWebCredential and SecAddSharedWebCredential currently only work on device, not in Simulator.

Known Issues

Applications that use Apache Cordova/PhoneGap are broken due to a bug that causes the window.navigator.userAgent object to become undefined when window.navigator is replaced by a pure JavaScript wrapper object.

If you pass NULL for the fqdn parameter of SecRequestSharedWebCredential as recommended, only the first domain in the entitlement is used.

For all of those who can’t get the update to show up, here’s how to fix it:
1) Head over to the Wi-Fi settings, turn off Wi-Fi
2) Go back to the Software Update section in settings, and the update should appear, but will not download
3) Turn Wi-Fi back on, let it connect to a network
4) Go back to the Software Update section, and it should be available for download

I have the exact same setup as you and it has not worked for me either. It’s not backwards compatible so make sure you are running both new beta’s on your devices. I finally got SMS to work with the new beta and it functions very well but I can only reply to SMS messages, I still cannot start new SMS conversations from my Mac. Also, phone calls have not worked either. I cannot place calls from my Mac but when I get a call on my phone it rings my Mac however the call fails if I try to answer.

Yes, I’d love to see removable bundled applications. Of course I can put them away in a folder but the fact that they’re there bugs me, especially if many apps are added that I don’t use like Podcasts. Heck the App Store even prompts new users to install those apps so no one will miss the opportunity.

finally! Fullscreen photos when somebody calling you! http://cl.ly/image/160J3N3Q361j
(its my friend on the photo – but very old and bad because of Apple..) – I had to cover it (very poorly, sorry :D)..

ibooks is also not removable from the home screen and may infer it will come preinstalled. Makes sense since ibooks on mac is a system app. I wish they would separate out system app updates from os updates like osx.

The best news I’ve heard for a while. Asking before it redirects you to the AppStore from Safari. It’s beyond annoying when you load a page start reading and Suddenly get shunted to some crap role playing game in the App Store.

all the problems i was having were fixed, the camera on my 5s was extremely slow with beta 1, it would take forever to take a picture and to auto focus, now its extremely fast like it was on iOS 7, other then that its working like a charm for me